<table> </table> SURPRISE, Ariz. | You&#8217;re not going to like this. People who study such things say the Royals are the least-popular team in baseball, and that&#8217;s not even the worst part: you can&#8217;t blame this one on an East Coast bias.</p><p>Turnkey Sports &amp; Entertainment, a respected marketing research firm, says the Royals rank dead-last 30th among Major League Baseball teams in popularity in their own market. That means they ranked the Royals&#8217; popularity in Kansas City compared to the Mariners&#8217; in Seattle and the Pirates&#8217; in Pittsburgh and so on.</p><p>And the Royals came up bottoms.</p><p>&#8220;You hate to see anything that counters the thought that you&#8217;re gaining positive momentum with your fans,&#8221; says <strong>Mark Tilson</strong>, the Royals&#8217; vice president of sales and marketing. &#8220;We take more stock in hard figures like sponsorship dollars, attendance figures, ticket sales, things like that.&#8221;</p><p>The finding does seem a bit strange, from a Kansas City perspective. There seems to be more local interest in the Royals as the team improves from its laughingstock status a few years ago, and is about to open a heavily renovated stadium they hope coincides with an emergence as a contender in the American League Central.</p><p>The Royals finished 29th in attendance last season &#8212; 3,000 or so more than the Marlins. The Nationals&#8217; radio ratings last year were so low they bordered on statistical insignificance.</p><p>But the Royals, apparently, are less popular in their market than either of those teams in theirs.</p><p>A spokesman for Turnkey says the rankings were based on surveys filled out by sports fans in each market. About 200 people in Kansas City were polled on more than a dozen questions, including how likable the players are, the team&#8217;s commitment to winning, how enjoyable it is to go to games, and so on. The Royals ranked 25th last year.</p><p>The Chiefs, perhaps not surprisingly considering all the losing lately, rank 25th among the NFL&#8217;s 32 teams. Of the 122 teams in the four major sports, Turnkey ranks the Chiefs 76th and the Royals 110th.</p><p>Our teams did better in the &#8220;loyalty&#8221; rankings: 40th overall for the Chiefs, and 81st for the Royals.</p><p>The Packers ranked first overall in popularity.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Sports Daily a &#8216;10&#8217;</span></strong></p><p><em>The Star</em> had another standout year in the Associated Press Sports Editors&#8217; contest. For the 10th consecutive year, Sports Daily was rated in the Top 10 in at least two of the three section categories in the largest circulation category. <em>The Star</em> won for special section &#8212; our 10th consecutive Top 10 &#8212; and for daily sports section.</p><p>In writing, the Star had three Top 10s: <strong>Joe Posnanski </strong>for columns and <strong>Bill Reiter </strong>in explanatory writing for a story that foreshadowed <strong>Carl Peterson&#8217;s </strong>firing. Also, <strong>Blair Kerkhoff</strong>, <strong>J. Brady McCollough</strong>, <strong>Posnanski</strong>, <strong>Reiter</strong>, <strong>Howard Richman </strong>and <strong>Jason Whitlock </strong>won in projects for their chronicling of Kansas&#8217; 1988 and 2008 NCAA titles.